C Programming/C Reference/math.h

math.h is a header file in the standard library of the C programming language designed for basic mathematical operations. Most of the functions involve the use of floating point numbers. C++ also implements these functions for compatibility reasons and declares them in the header cmath (the C99 functions are not available in the current C++ standard, C++ 98).

The reciprocal of the square root of two (also the square root of 1/2).

All values are of type double. As an extension, the GNU C library also defines these constants with type long double. The long double macros have a lowercase ‘l’ appended to their names: M_El, M_PIl, and so forth. These are only available if _GNU_SOURCE is defined.

Note: Some programs use a constant named PI which has the same value as M_PI. This constant is not standard; it may have appeared in some old AT&T headers, and is mentioned in Stroustrup's book on C++. It infringes on the user's name space, so the GNU C library does not define it. Fixing programs written to expect it is simple: replace PI with M_PI throughout, or put ‘-DPI=M_PI’ on the compiler command line.

While these constants are common, they are not part of the C standard, so most modern compilers require an explicit definition (such as _USE_MATH_DEFINES in Microsoft Visual C++ [1]) for them to be defined when including math.h.